7. Hunger Makes Saints
CHAPTER SEVEN
hunger makes saints
The fire is dead. Clara hasn't woken up since the surgery. I sit in the snow-filled corner, holding her against my chest. Her skin is grey, clammy. The wound on her shoulder is a black, crusty, puckered ruin. It smells of burnt meat and ozone. It smells like a war crime. I check her pulse every ten seconds. Thump. Pause. Thump. She’s holding on. I am not.
Hunger has stopped being a pain and started being a hallucination.
It’s a lens that distorts the world, bending the light into impossible shapes.
I see things in the shadows. Figures. Tall, thin men in ice-blue coats.
They stand just outside the broken walls, watching.
They don't have faces. Just masks. Porcelain.
Smiling. One of them steps through the wall.
He doesn't break the wood; he flows through it like smoke.
He is impossibly tall, his top hat scraping the broken rafters.
He leans over me, his mask a frozen rictus of amusement.
“Enforcer,” he whispers. His voice sounds like cracking ice, like the groan of a glacier calving. “You look tired.” I shake my head, dislodging the snow that’s settled on my hair.
"No. Not yet."
"I have a job," I rasp. “A job.” He laughs, a sound like glass breaking in a cathedral.
“You have a corpse. A burden. Let her go, Rowan. Let her become part of the foundation.” He points a gloved finger at Clara.
The leather of his glove is stitched with silver thread.
It looks expensive. It looks like a shroud.
“She is heavy,” he whispers. “Drop the weight. Walk with us. We have a fire that never burns out. We have a game that never ends.”
"Back off," I snarl. I raise the knife, my hand trembling.
"What show?"
"No," I shout. The word tears at my throat.
"You’re shaking," Clara whispers.
I look down. Her eyes are open. Glassy. She’s back, but she’s drifting.
"Cold," I rasp. My jaw aches. My tongue feels too big for my mouth.
"Liar."
She tries to sit up, but the pain slams her back down. She gasps, a wet sound. I hold her still. The heat between us feels wrong now—too alive. Too close to theft. I’m stealing her warmth to keep myself going.
"Just breathe."
"I am. It hurts to breathe."
We count breaths. The wind howls through the open roof, low and round.
"Do you hear that?" she whispers.
"It’s the storm."
"No. It’s... music."
"It sounds beautiful," she says, her eyes drifting shut. "It sounds like a parade."
"Don't sleep," I command. "Clara, stay with me. The parade isn't for us."
"Rowan... what happens when we get out?"
I almost laugh. The sound scrapes my throat. "You think there’s an after?"
"There has to be."
"Then you tell me. What does it look like?"
She smiles. It’s a broken, terrifying thing. Her lips are cracked and bleeding.
"Coffee," she whispers. "Real, black coffee. So hot you have to hold the cup with both hands. It smells like safety. Not smoke. Not burning flesh. And clean sheets. White ones."
I stare into the grey light. I try to imagine the smell of coffee. All I can smell is the iron tang of my own starvation.
"We’ll get coffee," I lie. "We'll buy the whole damn shop."
"And pancakes," she adds. "Blueberry. With too much syrup."
"Sure. Pancakes."
She closes her eyes again. "We’re saints, Rowan," she murmurs.
"What?"
"Hunger makes saints. We’re suffering for something. We're being hollowed out so we can be filled with something else."
"We're just starving, Clara."
"No," she whispers. "The ice is carving us. It's making us into something durable. Only saints and monsters survive this."
I look at the blood under my fingernails. I look at the knife lying in the snow. If this is sainthood, then heaven is a slaughterhouse.
Keep something alive.